Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday appoint John Gustafson to the position of senior fellow and chief product architect at graphics business unit. Mr. Gustafson, who is primarily known as a parallel processing specialist, will set the technical vision for the AMD graphics business unit, driving the technology roadmap as well as new technology planning and execution of business objectives.

“With the growing importance of parallel compute in defining the computing experience, John brings the full package of industry experience and knowledge needed to help us expand and execute our AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro graphics technology programs, and will help forge an aggressive long-term roadmap that allows AMD to continue to lead and win with our gaming and virtualization technologies,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics.

Gustafson is a 35-year veteran of the computing industry. He joins AMD from Intel, where he headed the company’s eXtreme Technologies Lab, conducting cutting-edge research on energy-efficient computing and memory, as well as optical, energy and storage technologies. Prior to that, he served as CEO at Massively Parallel Technologies and CTO at ClearSpeed Technology, a high-performance computing company. Mr. Gustafson has also held key management and research positions at numerous companies including Sun Microsystems, Ames Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

In 1988, Gustafson wrote Reevaluating Amdahl's Law to address limitations of Amdahl’s Law, which models the maximum potential performance improvement from parallel processing. Gustafson proved that processors working in parallel can solve larger problems, marking a change in how the industry viewed parallel processing. Today, Gustafson’s Law is widely accepted among academia as the standard for parallel processing education.

“I look forward to working with my teams to expand the AMD graphics technology roadmap. The next decade will serve as a watershed era for GPUs in graphics rendering power and compute capabilities, creating the opportunity for multi-teraFLOPS APUs. In terms of raw performance, the evolution of discrete graphics has far exceeded that of the CPU, and the programmable characteristics of today’s GPUs have thrown open a door that could very well see it rival the CPU as the most critical element of computer performance in the near future,” said Mr. Gustafson.

Tags: AMD, Intel, Radeon, FirePro, buriness, ATI